Chelsea Ryoko Wong

Kindly donated by Chelsea Ryoko Wong and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

About this work:

The subject matter of each painting is derived from the artist’s memory as well as her multicultural heritage. She collects s moments of joy and lays them down with paint: a family gathering for dim sum, or soaking in a Japanese onsen. In Last Run of the Day (2023), she recalls a weekend spent in the Sierra Mountains with friends, challenging themselves to a day skiing and snowboarding on the slopes and anticipating the delights of apres-ski that await. Each figure is imbued with a distinct individuality, from the color of their skin to their snow attire and the flair of their movement down the mountain. A colorist at heart, she imbues the white cast of snow with prismatic reflections from the setting sun. 

About the artist:

Chelsea Ryoko Wong (b. 1986, Seattle, WA) is a painter and muralist, raised in Seattle and living and working in the Mission District of San Francisco. Inspired by the multifaceted communities and landscapes of California, Wong’s layered compositions celebrate the joy of communal existence. Landscapes of the Sierra Mountains, Yuba River, and Sea Ranch infiltrate her canvases, as well as street scenes and interiors of bustling cultural centers like San Francisco Chinatown. Her figures are playful, strong, and self-possessed, representing a collects ive of racial and cultural identities that defy political turbulence.

Trained as a printmaker, Wong employs flat layers of color and highly stylized patterning, akin to ukiyo-e, in her compositions. Infatuated with color theory, Wong adopts Josef Albers’s halo effect, pairing two discordant colors in vibrating and visual harmony. She has often been associated as a successor of Bay Area movements, like The Mission School or Bay Area Figuration. Certainly, Wong’s relentless commitment to autobiography and graphic color recall the oeuvre of second-generation Bay-Area figurative artist Joan Brown.

Wong attended Parsons School of Design, New York and received her BFA in printmaking from California College of the Arts. She is the first recipient of the Hamaguchi Emerging Artists Fellowship award at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley and was a 2022 finalist for SFMOMA’s esteemed SECA Art Award. She has completed large-scale mural projects in San Francisco at Asana; La Cocina; and through the facdbook Artist in Residence Program. Her work has been acquired by institutional and private collects ions including the de Young, Replica Handbags s Museums of San Francisco and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Bay Area Now 9 this fall at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.